Horses for courses

The opportunity that alcohol offers to change the world always astounds me. The number of times beer has helped me and a few friends resolve all of the world's problems are just too many to count. The only surprising thing is waking up the next day to find that the problems are still there.

Over the weekend I had one of those experiences. It's all to do with Universities and the application of knowledge. It's not news to say that British and other Universities have changed a lot over the past few years. Things like the huge expansion in student numbers, the introduction of fees and market mentalities, and the development of R&D enterprise parks are just a few.

My experience of the academic world, and of the twilite zone of business development, intellectual property exploitation and application of knowledge tsarted us off. But the collected wisdom of an engineer, a retired company director, my dad's reflections over the years as a remarkable polymath researcher and lecturer, together with a biomedical researcher made all the difference.

I won't say we reached a consensus, but what I came away with was a sense that Universities have fallen or are falling between two pillars, and not doing as well in either as perhaps some of the alternatives could.

One lamentation I hear is for the good old days of pure research, and the opportunities for people in one discipline in a University to wander the library pursuing the kind of trail now represented by Internet hyperlinks. This was a creative, exploratory activity. It led sometimes to innovation, and sometimes to new perspectives on old problems.

And yet this is now the kind of thing that the wise companies of today are paying consultants millions each year to help them develop in their people. The number of seminars, consultancies, publications, websites, blogs and whatever dedicated to bringing innovation and creativity to the business world is staggering.

Meanwhile, universities are less and less places for minds to wander, discover, explore and create. There is an increasing introduction of business management and financial practices. Diversifying revenue streams, marketing, R&D full cost accounting ...

From two traditionally different parts of our societies there are converging paths. But for me, both are missing a huge point. The type of organisation that a university is - its structure, its culture, its place in society, its processes, its history has a fundamental effect on what it can successfully do. Universities have tried very hard to change, but they are not very good at what they are trying to do more of, and they are less good at what they used to do more of. This is not to say they shouldn't change, or that the good old days were as great as they are remembered to be.

But staying with the argument, how many academics spend very significant amounts of their time now dealing with, battling with, and occasionally losing to the administrative costs of an organisation doing something it was not created to do? What is the opportunity cost of a highly trained scientist, historian or engineer spending so much time doing something else?

In the world of business, the economic landscape is changing dramatically fast. What i suggest is happening is that businesses that are able to change dramatically enough their organisation, structure, people and culture have a chance of surviving. But there are many more new organisations that are starting from scratch specifically for today's purposes that will be around in the future, even if the 'failure' rate can be shocking at times. Nonetheless, this very flexibility makes it hard to establish continuity in terms of expertise, tacit knowledge, creative opportunity and costly research.

Ah well, this is all very logical, you may say; we see more and more partnerships between universities and businesses. Yes we do. Tell me how well they work. Tell the stories about how much time and effort is spent in trying to bridge the organisational and cultural gaps between these two. Is it working? Is it working as well as it could? And more crucially, will it stop universities and businesses from focusing on their strengths, or will it drag them closer and closer together?

I reckon there's a relatively logical thread there. I want to cut it now.

I believe it is a mistake to follow these processes any further. It is like two-party politics; it creates massively aligned tensions on a single axis between the two, and whether it pulls both ends towards the centre or polarises them towards the extremes, it is not getting the best out of the people, effort and knowledge that are all involved.

I believe that what we need is a new model of temporary organisation that can break the two-point dynamic. Instead of trying to set up hybrid models of businesses with university directors, and employing ex-finance directors as university business office directors, we should be looking at a new model altogether.

What we need is the new breed of renaissance entrepreneur that I've met suffering within all sectors. People who are passionate about pure research, about exploring ideas for their own sake; but who are not single-minded enough to dedicate their entire lives to such pursuits. people who have no interest in setting up long-term empires, and entrenching power structures, but instead prefer to create their lives as a series of spectacular stories or events. People who see opportunites and then get enormous satisfaction from leading or catalysing a band of fellow travellers to make it a real difference to people's lives.

Social entrepreneur doesn't do it for me. It's a related term maybe, but I'm specifically talking about the university and business context. It's needed, I'm up for it, and I'm looking forward to finding people to do it with.